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Sunday, November 7, 2010

granny baubles

Typically my partner and I have are not big Christmas people, we are lovers of the public holidays but not so much all the commercialism and family pressures. Neither of us are Christians and so we’re also a little weary of appropriating an event that is very meaningful to many. That being said since we’ve had children our participation in Christmas festivities has been increasing. The first Christmas after our son was born saw us head out to the shops late in the afternoon on Christmas Eve and buy our first ever Christmas tree. Bargain! That night I made paper-chains to decorate the tree and when the boy woke in the morning he was quite bewildered by the presence of a tree in the living room.

Now that Master E goes to 3+ kindy he is more and more absorbed by the general societal outlook on Christmas and my partner and I are in discussion about how we as a family want to proceed. Last night as the children slept I hooked up some of Pip’s granny baubles*, thinking about what I want for my family and children at this time of year. My mind was swirling with memories and considerations of religious events, pagan festivals, northern hemisphere traditions, post-colonialism … and so much more. Little wonder I was exhausted when I had finished and feel asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

One thing is clear from all that thinking. If I hadn’t committed to hooking a granny a day at the beginning of the year I would not have been hooking Christmas baubles in November. Christmas Eve maybe, but not in November! Amazing what a bit of granny fatigue will inspire one to do.

*The baubles that I bought must have been smaller than the ones Pip uses in her tutorial – easy to adjust though, rather than making sixteen stitches in the first found I made fourteen… and then all was good.

Funny. As a Christian I choose not to celebrate any of the "religiou" festivals because none of them are actually Christia. They are all based on pagan festivities and ideas and adopted by the universal church at that time in order to insure that all people would have little trouble accepting the new state "religion". Just can't see how the god of the Bible would find such a repudiation of him as acceptable. Cherrie

Love Cherie's comment!We don't do Christmas at all. It is hard, hard harder to explain and appease the girls but I'm sticking to it. I do love the look of those granny baubles though and think that I might have to invent another excuse to decorate.

Awesome! I was never a 'tree' person and never understood Christmas until the little person came along. Now I HAVE to have a tree so I can make decorations to put on it LOL. My 'to do' list just got bigger again :)

It's interesting to revisit the Christmas thing for the first time sinc my own childhood, and to work out what I'd like my Bug to associalte with Christmas. I love Christmas carols and so has he since his first Christmas when he was 11 months old, so that's in. I also love storytelling and traditional narratives- actually that's my job! I wasn't sure how I was going to explain what all the songs were about without delving deeply into religous doctrine, so I asked my mum to knit a little Nativity scene so that we could act out the stories in the songs- "That's the baby called Jesus, that's the shepherd, these are the three kings" etc.

Aha! I just found the pattern: http://www.spotlight.com.au/inspiration/projects/knitted-nativity-scene/

This year I'm making this!It's good for learning the concept of the dates and it's absolutely divine!: http://www.aktraditions.com/html/advent_calendar_kit.html